


Afraid to Sleep

by arenoseAnima



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, sleep problems, stupid nautical metaphor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-21
Updated: 2012-01-21
Packaged: 2017-10-29 21:31:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/324366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arenoseAnima/pseuds/arenoseAnima
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are things more important than quadrants. Bad dreams, for example.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Afraid to Sleep

_It is your RECUPERACOON full of nourishing SOPOR SLIME. Every young troll enjoys the cozy embrace of such a vessel each night, and the relaxing ooze helps assuage the terrible visions of blood and carnage that plague the dark subconscious of your species._

Mindfang swings onto Dualscar’s ship with her usual loud guffaw, the sound washing off the deck and dipping into the clutching hands of the ocean, but mostly being really goddamn loud. Her crew salutes her as they turn the rudder and send the ship skidding across the wave-ripped sea again; nobody wants to make her shoo them. They learned their lesson last time. Mindfang has already forgotten her ship was even there in the first place; she’s in a black, black mood, hungrily anticipating her scheduled duel with her kismesis. But he’s not coming out to meet her. Clever mind games aren’t his style - as long as she’s known him, he’s only ever tricked her by accident. She _hates_ it when he does that, the ignorant, wall-eyed bastard, he wouldn’t be able to find his mainmast with a topographical map.

She could walk the boards to his cabin blindfolded with her hands bound behind her back; she can practically feel the grain of the wood even through her stiletto heels. There’s no sound save for the creaking of the timbers and the wash of the waves. Even Mindfang respects the sanctity of silence sometimes; her opening laugh still rings in her ears like one of Redglare’s biting chuckles, and she regrets it with the same sick, secret bile that flows in the wake of all her mistakes.  So she just walks the path to her kismesis’ cabin with a hand trailing along the wooden wall. She’s been wrapped up in enough battles to know that there’s always a breath before a brawl, and you don’t talk while the conductor is raising his baton. She just wonders what the downstroke is going to bring.

Dualscar’s door is shut. The narwhals and seahoofbeasts on it watch Mindfang with their sapphire eyes. She can feel them judging her. Assholes. Dualscar is probably in there gelling up his hair and they’re out here, staring at somebody who could fight him to his knees and has done more times than she can count. She presses her ear to the door, in between a crab and an octopus; all she hears is wood. That contemptuous tool can’t even be bothered to play her some entrance music. She’s going to make him change his name to Orphaner Nobulge once she gets this _fucking_ door open. She hooks her fingers in the handles and hauls; the rubber sweep on the bottom of the door swishes over the floor like Dualscar’s hips in that red dress he likes.

As usual the first thing that greets her eyes when she gets the door open is the horrible rug he plundered from some swap meet near the north pole. It’s got trunkbeasts on it. How tacky. Her eyes track up the rug, stained despite his best efforts with blood and wine and other, darker debaucheries. His recuperacoon, big enough for twenty, sits low in the back of the room like a sleeping dragon, and there, sitting in front of it, is Dualscar. He’s naked, showing off the scars etching every muscle, and then she realizes that he’s not showing off - nobody, not even him, would show off hunched over on himself, clutching his knees, his face wrenched up, a pool of sopor slime seeping into the floorboards around him. The dark circles under his eyes are full of purple, purple sloshing from his eyes and running in great drips down his chest, a tiny trickle running from his nose. He’s a mess of blood and slime, and he hasn’t even heard her come in. As she watches, not knowing what to feel, he lifts a hand off his knee and drags it indelicately over his nose. He hasn’t even got any of his rings on.

“Dualscar,” she says, but it doesn’t  come out save for a tiny croak. He looks _pathetic_ , but not in a _pity_ way, and she realizes how stupid that sounds even as she thinks it. How can somebody be pathetic without being pitiful? Luckily, he looks up before she has to speak again and voice these nonsensical thoughts. He meets her eyes for a second, then looks away immediately, his mouth twisting like snapped fishing line reeled in too quick. She speaks anyway. “Nightmares?” Like this hasn’t happened to her - like this hasn’t happened to _every_ troll who’s ever wriggled out of the birthing caverns. Everyone has bad days. You just hope you don’t have _too_ many, and sometimes that hope runs thinner than red blood.

“Yeah,” he says. She had almost forgotten she spoke, watching his chest rise and fall with what she imagines as the effort of fleeing the flickering eyes of a demoness with curling horns. She sees her own scraggly-haired evenings in his drawn and tired face. He doesn’t say anything else; she knows he’s probably scared of looking weak. She knows better than that. Dualscar is a lot of things - ostentatious, foppish, arrogant, selfish - but he is _not_ weak. As if there are any trolls who’ve escaped the grip of the nightmares that hound them through the daylight. He probably thinks himself inferior because he’s like the rest of their race. She looks down at him, feeling bubbling black fondness wrench her heart.

Mindfang walks the rug-covered planks to the slumped form of her kismesis. She doesn’t know what she’s doing, but she has to do _something_. To leave him here like this would be worse than hatred, it would be _disgusting_ on a very basic level, like refusing a dying wiggler a mercy cull. He looks up at her, but it’s too late for him to tell her to stop as she crouches down next to him, their eyes level - they’re nearly the same height and they both hate it. She looks down at the pool of slime under them both and sighs, then shifts her hips until she’s sitting cross-legged at his side, slime soaking her favorite coat. Wonderful. His brows are furrowed, but under that she can see relief in his eyes, a familiar expression for such a cowardly kismesis. This time, though, she’s not making him piss himself in terror. “Dualscar,” she says again, like saying his name will help this mess - but she sees it _does_ help, the fear filling his hunched posture dissipating a little more. “Orphaner,” she murmurs, and then his name, the old one that’s long lost to time. He moves towards her, just a jerking start, then asks her with his eyes - she answers by shifting her arm around, exposing her side. When he leans in against her her arm closes around his shoulders like the jaws of a shark.

It’s odd, having his warm, sweat-slime-damp body resting against hers. The last thing either of them wants to do after a particularly intense blackfuck is _cuddle_. She’s becoming acquainted with a whole new world of fluttering gills tickling her neck and knees jabbing sensitive places. She tips her head towards him and sighs into his hair.  

“Fuckin’ shameful,” he says into her shoulder after a couple of minutes that drag like anchors. “Seekin’ a shitty mornin’s comfort in the arms a’... no, wait, the _stem_ a’ my spade. Bet my ancestor, whoever he fuckin’ was, newwer woulda stooped so low.”

“You are an overdramatic and mawkish imbecile,” she tells him. “But you seem to be feeling better. I presume our dalliance can wait - “ His fingers tighten ever so slightly on her waist as she moves to get up, and she sighs. “You have the emotional fortitude of a wiggler.” Her arm slides back around him, and her fingertips rest on the elliptical scars where his old legs used to be.

“You know how it is,” he mutters. “Only time you get a good day’s sleep is when you’re least expectin’ it. And the shitty days are _really shitty_.” He drops his face against her shoulder again; she looks down at the mess of his hair, his horns framing her face. Her heart aches, and she’s suddenly, absurdly angry at the demoness for ruining what was sure to be an excellent day. She rests her hand on the back of his neck and makes slow circles with her thumb on top of his spine while she thinks. She remembers her childhood and the way her lusus had soothed her - mandibles stroking through her shining black mane, the dagger tips of limbs more used to rending corpseflesh stroking along her skin with a gentleness that hardly scarred at all. Mostly, she remembers the way the old spider used to sing to her; the dead-channel hisses and clicks would follow her into dreams of salt spray and the moons rising over a glass-smooth horizon. She doesn’t have the mouthparts for it, but she can try, and whenever Mindfang tries she _wins_.

It’s a hard start, especially if she imagines that Dualscar might laugh her off his boat and to the bottom of the sea. Her voice catches in her throat a few times, but then, like riggings freshly cleaned of ice, the soft _ch-ch-shhhh-ch-ch-cht-hhhh_ comes out of her in long rolling waves of sound. Dualscar stirs, a curious sound coming from his throat, but she blankets it in more hushed churring. He moves less by the moment, by each renewed wash of breath coming out of Mindfang’s mouth and flowing down his gills and neck, but she doesn’t stop; once she finds her rhythm, the clicks in the back of her throat, the roll of her tongue and the taps of its tip on her teeth, they barely register anymore. She drags her nose through his hair over and over, tracing his immaculately-maintained part, and stops keeping track of the passing minutes save for how frequently she touches her nose to his forehead - five times, ten, twenty, fifty. It takes the slackness of his mouth against her jacket for her to realize that he’s fallen asleep. By the smoothness of his brow, he seems to have been out for a while. She closes her lips, trapping the song of her dead mother back inside her where it belongs, and disengages her limbs from Dualscar’s. He still sleeps like a wiggler tucked against her side with no support, and her lips curl with nauseating fondness anyway. There’s sea enough and time, she figures, to help her dearly disgusting kismesis get to sleep once in a pink moon.

She can’t just leave him sprawled over the floor, though, as hilarious as it would be for him to wake up even more miserable than when they started. She shifts with ponderous care envied by plate tectonics and stands at the same time as she lifts him into her arms; either she’s outdone herself once again or Dualscar is just that much of a lunkhead. She doesn’t know which she prefers. The chanciest proposition taken care of with her usual aplomb, Mindfang lowers him into his recuperacoon. He lays there in the slime, starting to snore and looking like a particularly poorly-crafted marionette tossed in the garbage. She looks down at him and considers a variety of exciting punishments for his wasting her day - a broken horn, a slashed gill, a guide on how not to disappoint a woman lovingly cut into his chest - but after not really very much thought at all she bends and kisses his temple, feeling the pulse under his skin for a moment.

And then she stabs her favorite boot knife into his recuperacoon and stomps out of his cabin, cursing a cerulean streak all the way up to the deck.

\---

 _Years in the past, ~~but not many~~..._

The Dolorosa is reading. To be exact, she’s reading the latest monthly issue of _Children of the Light_ , the most highly-regarded rainbow drinker fiction publication on Alternia. She occasionally shifts her thighs this way or that; she’s sure the rustle of her dress against her skin wouldn’t wake the tiniest squeakbeast, but sure enough she hears the pitter-patter of tiny feet coming down the tunnel. She quickly stashes her magazine amidst Respectable Literature and sits with her hands folded on her knee, waiting for the Signless to arrive.

“’rosa,” he mumbles as he stands in the tunnel mouth, rubbing his red-rimmed eyes with tiny fists. His bare toes curl and uncurl on the cave floor. “’rosa, I had a shitty dream.” He drops his hands and stares up at her; it’s hard to see under his ratty cloak with the hood pulled up - she keeps trying to wash and repair the poor abused fabric, but he’s refused to take it off since the night she first swaddled him in it - but she thinks his eyes are brimming with crimson tears.

“Language,” she chides him even as she holds her arms out to him. He pads over to her and climbs into her lap; she cradles him against her chest and tugs his hood down so she can card her fingers through his horrific nest of hair. “My little softshell. What was it about this time?”

“Same thing,” he says, his small, high voice bearing far too much weight for a troll so young. “Everything was happy, and there were a bunch of fu - of trolls walking around and doing nice stuff, and then the green light again.” He dips his head, one nubby horn resting against her neck. She sighs, her fingertips resting on his spine. “’rosa, please, do _something_ , I can’t keep having these dreams!”

“Shh,” she says, and moves her hand to cup his cheek. Her thumb makes little circles on his skin. She smiles as she sees his eyelids already beginning to droop. “Shh-hh-hh-shhhhhh, shhhh, Signless, shhhhhh. Only sweet dreams now.” She pats his cheek with her fingers ever-so-gently so as not to stir him; his eyes are so heavy already. She wraps her arm around him and strokes his cheek, still shooshing him with all the tenderness she can muster. He lays like a stone in her arms, warm like the meteor that dropped him into her life, his breath on her shoulder already gospel.


End file.
